Chapter 1: Beginnings (Revision 1 - Substantial Rewrite)

Chapter 1: Beginnings

The wind was blowing fiercely across Mendel's face, whipping through his shoulder length jet-black hair. He didn't try to prevent the strands of hair from flicking his nose and occasionally making their way into his mouth through his slightly parted lips. The wind here was worse than it had ever been in Mendel's memory. It was hotter too. Much hotter. The air over the ground had a red hue to it because of the constant stirring up of microscopic dust particles under the scathing blast of the wind from over the exposed red clay on the surface. Actually, the soil here could hardly be called clay, now that all the moisture had been sucked out of it by a combination of the hot sun and the sweeping winds.

Mendel reached into the pocket of his black leather jumper which covered him head to toe. It closed around him, forming a turtleneck collar at the throat. It felt tight around his neck, but he knew there was nothing he could do about the tightness. He tugged at it all the time with two fingers between the leather and his skin. The leather used in these suits was treated with a cocktail of technology and chemicals giving it the ability to seal itself around the wearer leaving no visible seam. He had only to press a slightly raised circle embossed into the leather just over his Adam's apple to open the seam, causing the jumper to virtually fall away from his lanky limbs.

His fingers closed tightly around the coin in his pocket. He rubbed his thumb over each of the surfaces of the coin a few times, turning it over and over. After a few moments, he pulled it from his pocket and tossed the large silver coin into the air with a flick of his left thumb. It spun and gyrated quickly as it rose into the air, the sun glinting off of its quickly rotating surface, giving the reflected sunlight almost a haze, which Mendel squinted at. His eyes were sensitive to too much light, and this was certainly too much. He was already outside and wearing dark glasses to protect his sensitive eyes from light.

Despite the bright sunlight and the hazy reflection of the coin's surface, Mendel caught the coin deftly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He tossed it to his left, and placed it back in its worn place in his pocket.

“Who came up with the name ‘coin’ ?” Mendel thought to himself. He reflected back over the ten thousand years of human history that had passed during his lifetime. He turned from the sun and went back inside.

             “It’s such an outdated term...” he thought, again, to nobody but himself. “We don’t even use money anymore.”

             Mendel had kept the archaic coin in his pocket since the year 5486, the year his father had died. Coins had become three-dimensional triangles in the shape of a pyramid. On one side, the likeness of Earth’s president, appointed by the Monarchs in 5484, Jairus Cleventhal rose microscopically from the surface in a three dimensional holograph. The second side displayed a small globe, showing the three remaining continents of Earth’s surface (several continents had merged since what was then called Africa had collided with the Indian subcontinent in the year 2831, and when the Australian continent's edge slipped under the coast of South America in the year 5123). The third side was riddled with small scratches that gave it the texture of fine hair or grass waving in the wind with a large “2” engraved deeply in the center. The bottom had a pin-sized hole in it which gave the International Mint, or IM, access to insert a sensor that told the computer the authenticity of each “coin.”

            “Of course, none of this matters to anyone anymore,” Mendel thought.

            Mendel made his way back into the observation room, and sat in a comfortable chair near the window of his Galleon-class star jumper. He looked out over the barren landscape of the largest of the three continents, Monadnock, so named because of a single isolated hill rising out of the vast peneplain at the center of the continent.

            The final stages of fluvial erosion had been effecting the area since the scientists of earth had banded together to find a way and stabilize the tectonic shift of the earth before a new Pangaea was created. The political instability that had been witnessed in the previous merging and the further instability that was projected in the future was enough to unite the peoples of earth behind a single cause for the preservation of what was left of humanity.

             Mendel retrieved, touched, felt, examined, and put back his cherished coin many times while he stayed in the chair for what he perceived was several hours, still looking out over the barren land outside the ship. He wasn't really looking for anything in particular, except for perhaps trying to imagine the buildings, cities, and roads that used to occupy all the visible land as far away as the horizon. After being away from Earth for so long this time, he couldn't believe how much further his former home had deteriorated since his last visit 2,100 years ago. He swiveled the chair around and got up to return to the ship’s bridge. He paused momentarily, stretching the stiff muscles of his back and legs before he made the short walk.

              “How long have I been sitting there, staring at this burned and dry lump of red dust?” Mendel spoke aloud.

              “Sir, you were seated in the observation room for nearly 37 hours now. I've been monitoring your vitals, Sir, and you could use some nourishment. Would you like me to prepare you a meal?” replied the ships computer.

              “I’m tired of being home,” he said out loud, so the ship’s computer could hear him. “Let’s get out of here.”

              “Where would you like to go?” asked the computer. The computer spoke in a quiet and subdued male voice that was just a bit gravelly. Mendel had chosen this voice for the computer when he procured the ship because it reminded him of his father, long since passed away. Over time, he'd even subconsciously thought of the computer as his surrogate father, because it daily provided sustenance, shelter, transportation, and its endless wealth of information, much like a father would for his child.

             “Take me to the furthest inhabited planet from here. I just need to get away from it all. Cover my tracks. I don’t want anyone to follow us, or to know what we’re about to do,” Mendel shouted in a commanding voice as he continued purposefully walking.

            “What do you intend to do?” asked the computer.

“I’m going put an end to the rule of the Monarchs of the Fifty Galaxies!”

"And just how do you plan on doing that?" queried the computer.

Mendel again fingered the coin in his pocket, and scratched the back of his head with his other hand, thoughtfully. He stopped pacing around the bridge and replied, "I'm not sure yet, but I know we've got to get out of here. I can't stay. There's nothing left for me here... the Monarchs made sure of that a very long time ago. I'm giving you a command override order to never bring me back here, no matter what happens. I never want to see this place again."

"Very well sir. Command override order received and acknowledged. I've taken the liberty of setting a one thousand light-year perimeter of avoidance around Earth."

Mendel sat down in the captain's chair in the back of the bridge. He sat thoughtfully for a few minutes, and finally broke the silence with a question to the computer.

“Well, what are you waiting for? We need to get going.!”

“Sir, I don't recommend you ignore your nourishment any further. I've taken the liberty of preparing your favorite dish, Sosaties. It's ready for you now in the galley.”

Sosaties was an ancient dish from a large nation on the old African continent, called South Africa. It was a sort of curried lamb or mutton grilled over open coals on a skewer with large pieces of onion or other vegetables. Mendel thought it amazing that the ship's computer could so easily replicate the flavors and textures of this dish without so much as even a shaving of fresh lamb meat.

"How long will it take us to get wherever you're taking us?"

"We're already there... here, rather, but of course, I'm sure you knew the answer to that question. It was your team that discovered tesserotation."

The computer was right again, as always. Mendel thought back to the days when he worked endless hours in the lab studying dimensional particle physics. It was here that his team had discovered the true nature of the cubicle octet atom. Other scientists in the early 1900s had discarded many of the theories based on the octet atom in favor of the more popular quantum physics theories.

“That's where everyone went wrong...” Mendel said, under his breath.

“Wrong, sir? What are you referring to?” asked the computer.

“Quantum mechanics,” he shot back, grumpily. “It's not all wrong; Many great discoveries have resulted from those studies. They just missed out on perhaps one of the greatest technological advances in the history of the human race.”

“You're so modest, Sir!” retorted the computer in a voice that sounded like he had managed to pinch his circuit board nose.

Mendel retreated into memory, recalling the physics of the octet atom. He began to go over it again in his mind. Octet atoms reside and oscillate on any given point on a cube; the side, or a corner. That cube is inside a proportionately larger cube, and both cubes are connected at the corners by covalent bonds. The “cube within a cube,” or hypercube, is called a tesseract, and continually rotates so the inner cube expands around the outer cube which then itself becomes the inner cube. Octets are normally stationary in their locations on the tesseract, rotating in position with the tesseract itself.

There was a child's toy that he kept on his desk, that for lack of being a a pair of nested cubes represented the theory almost exactly. It looked like a sea cucumber. You could put your finger in one end and push through to the other side, and while you did, the vinyl, water-filled surface turned inwards on itself. The inside became the outside, and the outside became the inside. He had simulated an octect by drawing a tiny “x” on the surface and pushing it into the cucumber and watching it go into the center, out the other end and back to its original position on the top.

One of Mendel's colleagues, a man named Schroeder, had proposed that since the tesseract was a three-dimensional hypercube, that perhaps there was an exponential influence on the oscillation of the octect atom. Simply put, he postulated that if a cube was three-dimensional, then time could be as well. Any unit of time could be cubed. By enhancing every other vibration in an octet's oscillation in the direction they wanted it to go, reducing overall oscillation time, it would move to a new position on the tesseract. Initial tests revealed that by cubing the number of enhanced vibrations, an octect could progress through the entire tesserotation and return to its starting position or any other position they directed on the tesseract almost instantaneously. Increasing the wavelength of the oscillation enough would even allow it to jump short distances from once side of the cube to another where the wave intersected with that side.

Mendel wished he still had his toy cucumber right now. It reminded him of simpler days, when he wasn't gallivanting among the stars, looking for somewhere to hide from his past. His head started to slowly dip, his chin approaching his chest. He was falling asleep again sitting up.

“Sir? You really should take some nourishment and a good night's sleep wouldn't hurt you any either,” said the computer quietly, so as not to startle Mendel.

“Yeah, yeah... I know food and sleep and all of that rot. Sleep doesn't do anything to refresh the mind of a man who has already lived the lives of 1,000 men. I'm burned out.” He felt much like latex gloves that have been worn so long, they could tear and snap back violently at any moment exposing the wearer to untold doom.

”Leave me to my thoughts for a moment longer, will you?” Mendel snapped back at the computer in an angry shout.

He turned inward to his memories again. It was a disciplined mental exercise that was about the only thing that seemed to refresh him anymore.

He now remembered the day he discovered that it was possible to enhance multiple octets to move simultaneously, while nearby octets were not accelerated and stayed in their original positions. He named the process tesserotation.

"Sir," said the computer. "I could take us out of orbit by a couple of dozen light years, and use the hyperbole drive to return here later when you've rested. We'd be traveling at only 34 times the speed of light then, and it would take us a few days to return, and I've already verified that our presence here has not yet been detected."

"No. It's fine. We'll stay. I've got some work to do. I've put it off far too long already."

Mendel got up and went to the galley where he sat and enjoyed what might very well be his last really good meal for a while. What he was about to do would take him places and lead him to people with whom he was sure not to be treated as a respected visitor, let alone like any sort of family member. He was hated for these many centuries that he'd been roaming the expanses of the universe alone. It had been nearly 50 years since he'd even seen another human being.

* * * * *

The mass acceleration of alternating cubical octet atom oscillations on the tesseract (tesserotation) was limited only by the capacity of the computer used to perform the complex calculations needed to execute it. Mendel had the most advanced computer in the world. It should be. He'd been perfecting it for 7,500 years now, and it had some semblance to sentience, but was still really just a very advanced prompt-and-response system that learned heuristically from its users.

This is how Mendel had arrived at the planet Rasalas, one of the 50 Monarch Home Worlds. The computer tesserotated slowly enough that Mendel's ship had taken only 5.8 cubed minutes to arrive at Rasalas. As far as anyone would be able to tell from observation with the naked eye, he had simply not been there one second, and the next, he was there. Instruments recognized these kinds of arrivals just that same as if he had decelerated from the other type of space travel, hyperbole drive propulsion. The trip was still so fast that Mendel had not even perceived the journey while he was entrenched in his memories.

Mendel was the only surviving fringe scientist from the team who had realized the full potential of the tesserotation and its applications for space flight. Once the technology was developed to a point where he and the computer could finish the development and actually implement the tesserotation, he copied all of the research to his own computers and destroyed the originals, removed the other scientists' access to the project and simply disappeared from the Earth.

Or so they thought...